The Sad State Of Web Browser Support Currently Within Debian

[Brisse]

I'm still not sure Ubuntu strikes the right balance between moving forward send supporting legacy/older applications. But I do know that Arch and similar rolling release distributions go too far in the other direction.

Which is exactly the reason I run Debian testing. Yes, it's a development version, not a real supported release, but for my desktop purposes it does exactly what I want. Firefox is preferably pulled from unstable (testing only has ESR), which one can set up to do automatically using apt-pinning. I agree that the browser situation in stable is abysmal. In testing and unstable it's basically the same as any other distribution.

[aufkrawall]

That Firefox 91 ESR EGL statement should be just wrong, afaik it still uses GLX by default also on Mesa.
What a poor example of how Linux is done wrong. Seems Debian is not a trustworthy distribution.

[franglais125]

Has anyone tried using flatpak chromium on Debian? Same performance issues?

I don't use Debian on my desktop, but as a new laptop is planned for christmas I considered Debian for a short moment. Alternatives are Arch Linux and Ubuntu at the moment. But I don't want to annoy my wife with Arch and Ubuntu … well, Canonical's decisions are not what I want (e.g. Snap).

I use Firefox flatpak on debian, precisely due to the current state. I was not caught with a security issue as I pay a lot of attention to security in browsers.

Both Firefox and Chromium (flatpak) work just fine on Debian stable at the moment.

[user1]

Just run Firefox with Wine and get rid of all the Linux dependency bullshit.

Lol, if it even runs on Wine, I wonder if it can utilise DXVK for hardware acceleration, since Windows Firefox uses ANGLE - (OpenGL ES -> DX11)

[novideo]

Which is exactly the reason I run Debian testing. Yes, it's a development version, not a real supported release, but for my desktop purposes it does exactly what I want. Firefox is preferably pulled from unstable (testing only has ESR), which one can set up to do automatically using apt-pinning. I agree that the browser situation in stable is abysmal. In testing and unstable it's basically the same as any other distribution.

Debian/Devuan unstable is a better rolling release than Arch IMO. instead of flatpak, why not debootstrap Sid and run a browser in the chroot?

[Phil995511]

It's been 3 years since I switched to a pure Debian in a stable version, overall it is an excellent and very flexible OS.

The problem you raise with poorly updated software seems to me to be directly related to the lack of volunteer maintainers and perhaps to a lack of rigor in the procedures that these maintainers must follow. Flatpak can indeed be an alternative to this problem, but that does not solve the fundamental problems that Debian suffers from.

Indeed there are some nice shortcomings in Debian, like the Nvidia version 460.x drivers which probably weren't compiled with DKMS and which don't work with 5.14 or 5.15 kernels. Or the Cinnamon interface which is partially bugged and for which there is only one active maintainer who does not have time to take care of it ;-( Blueman 2.1.4.1 who is unable to add a keyboard Bluetooth. Or the problem with the web browsers you're talking about. There must be others...

Officially, the folks at Debian tell us that web browsers are not in the latest available versions, but are patched in internally by Debian maintainers for security, in the same way that Red Hat maintainers internally patch for security the old Linux kernels they use !! Tell us this information would be incorrect ?!?!

See below, Firefox 78 the first version of which dates from June 2020 and was recently patched under Debian :

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...paign=whatsnew

What is very frustrating with Debian stable is that it is quite buggy. I must for exemple to use some SID packages to be able to make my distribution work without bugs. Basically everything does not work perfectly ;-(

Ideally, it would be nice if Debian launched a rolling release version of its OS that is 100% functional

[Nocifer]

So Debian is unsuitable for the desktop? You don't say. Debian's philosophy has always been great(-ish) for the server but unsuitable for the desktop, and modern (read: fast) software development trends have only served to exacerbate the issue, especially when it comes to Linux, which has been seeing rapid development and a slew of changes in many of its key areas/libraries lately due to the increased recent interest, so a distro keeping "stable" versions around just won't cut it anymore. Add to this the various security vulnerabilities that are increasingly being found and that need fixes to be patched in ASAP, but which fixes often rely on newer library versions, and a "stable" distro quickly gets promoted from annoying to dangerous.

That said, the problem does already have somewhat of a solution, and it's called Flatpak. With it, we can have the best of both worlds: a stable base system with the latest user-facing apps. The sad thing is that like so many things in Linux, it's been years and Flatpaks are still not perfected as a proper replacement for normal packages, with some issues (like proper theming support and general desktop integration) not even being on the radar of its developers. Goddamn GNOME mentality... And to think those imbeciles apparently have dreams of beating Apple at their own UX game. (Disclaimer: I severely dislike Apple and many of its UX choices, but their attitude around UX design and user satisfaction is top-notch.)

[reba]

Yeah, well, Michael, I don't know...


root@debian:/tmp# apt-cache policy chromium firefox falkon
chromium:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 93.0.4577.82-1
Version table:
93.0.4577.82-1 500
500 https://deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
firefox:
Installed: 94.0.2-1
Candidate: 95.0-1
Version table:
95.0-1 500
500 https://deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages
*** 94.0.2-1 100
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
falkon:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 3.1.0+dfsg1-11
Version table:
3.1.0+dfsg1-11 500
500 https://deb.debian.org/debian unstable/main amd64 Packages

[dragonn]

Debian/Devuan unstable is a better rolling release than Arch IMO. instead of flatpak, why not debootstrap Sid and run a browser in the chroot?

Lol never, Debian unstable in 2 years of my usage failed me more times they Arch in over 10 years.

[V1tol]

That Firefox 91 ESR EGL statement should be just wrong, afaik it still uses GLX by default also on Mesa.
What a poor example of how Linux is done wrong. Seems Debian is not a trustworthy distribution.

Also been suprised with that statement. I do remember that EGL was enabled in 94 by default and it made browser so much faster that I even noticed that on my not too weak laptop. In any case Debian maintainers could simply switch setting back to GLX if EGL was upstream decision.